Letters: Indefensible spending

As Andrew Cockburn points out, the DefenseDepartment routinely channels huge amounts of taxpayer money to fund white-elephant projects such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Littoral Combat Ship, neither of which would have been helpful in preventing the 9/11 attacks or in dealing with its perpetrators. The military-industrial complex continues to develop weapons designed to defend against a conventionally armed nation-state at a time when our most serious threat has come from a splintered network of cave-dwelling fanatics.

We now approach an economic "fiscal cliff" blindly funding the military with money we don't have to build machinery that doesn't work against an enemy that doesn't exist.